L3 Harris (LHX) at the Baird Industrials conference on the DOD modernization push… “We’re in the early innings of a modernization cycle. The DoD has an installed base of 1 million units. This modernization cycle that we’re going through is only going to modernize about 1/3 of that installed base. And of that, we’re only about 15% of the way through. And the most recent procurements for production on the Army HMS programs, both the manpack and the handheld, that was an endorsement of the modernization even in this budget environment that we’re in. Night vision is similar there where we’re providing a pretty unique capability with our ENVG program. That program of record is about 100,000 units. We’re just starting delivering of the 6,000 units of that. So very early innings there. It is dual sourced. But again, in that program, on the most recent production award, we did win the majority share on that one as well. And so we’re excited about that program and continued modernization there. And then as I mentioned, ISR is for us a little bit over $3 billion business. So, when you look at our exposure, whether it’s O&M or exposure in the shorter-cycle business, they’re underpinned by their modernization or a key requirement capability that the DoD needs going forward. It’s like a sustainment of these legacy programs that we see being retired, it’s actually modernizing a capability that the DoD is going to continue to need over the next 5 to 10 years.”

Owens Corning (OC) Analyst Day on key secular trends expanding its TAM five-fold… “As we look to the future, we see 4 big secular trends that are not only contributing to our current performance, they are creating significant new opportunities to grow our company over the next decade.  The premium put on living spaces will continue to drive investments for new residential housing and renovation in both the U.S. and abroad. The demand for sustainable solutions also continues to accelerate as the global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and develop more renewable energy sources increases. And we continue to see the need for investments to upgrade and expand infrastructure both in the U.S. and around the world. As we look at the broad building and construction market, we continue to see great potential to strengthen our core market positions and product lines. In addition to more multi-material systems offerings, we also see the need for more prefabricated construction solutions increasing over the next several years, driven by the need for more sustainable, more cost-effective solutions that reduce the amount of on-site labor and overall construction cycle times.  As you can see in the chart on the right, these strategic pillars give us the potential to expand our total addressable market to approximately $200 billion, a fivefold increase versus our current opportunity.”

Kornit Digital (KRNT) earnings call discussing the Direct to Fabric (DTF) market… “So, the DTF market, we believe that we are in a verge of really creating a huge transformation of this industry. This industry is the most polluted industry or the second most polluted industry in the world, creating huge amount of waste, both of water and waste of material, who needs innovation, bringing to the market, the Presto Max really enabling to do on demand production with fully sustainable without wasting water and producing exactly what’s needed. On top of that, we’re enabling endless creativity with this solution. You don’t need any more to plan 1 year ahead of time, what will be the design, what the consumer will want to wear, you can react fast-to-market trends and changes. And this is the perfect solution for the market. We released the Presto Max, we demonstrated last week, both in L.A., and the week before in Italy, and we got amazing feedback. The Presto Max actually bringing on top of what the Presto bought before, the capability to print on dark fabrics with white ink. Also the XDi printing 3D elements on top of the fabric and also neon color, really enabling a huge amount of creativity. This industry needs a major change. And last week, at L.A., we actually got the feedback from thousands of designers, brands, retails that were with us, and they were saying, this is exactly what we needed. What we demonstrated with designers last week is exactly what the market needs in terms of creativity, in terms of sustainability, in terms of on demand. In terms of unleashing really the creativity and the democratizing fashion into anyone that wants to create designs.”

Rockwell (ROK) Analyst Day on its Software strategy… “We all know that the industrial software market is huge at $20 billion. But increasingly, we see it becoming more dynamic. Customers are changing their behavior in industrial software. They want easier to deploy, easier to use solutions, and that’s driving a preference for cloud. we see that, that’s a huge market driver for us, and it informs a big part of Rockwell software strategy. We’re bringing new cloud-based software to the process of automation system and visualization system design and deployment. Customers want this new capability. It’s multiuser and collaborative. It takes a system view of the automation design, not a controller deal. So it’s very broad in scope, and we’re delivering the most modern programming approaches into the hands of our users. This really allows Rockwell to serve new users in new industries and grow bigger opportunities. Move #2 is about going big in the cloud for production operations. Again, these are software areas like manufacturing execution, supply chain management, quality management, asset management and even more. These are perfect applications to take advantage of cloud-based technologies. Our customers want to see the benefits of easier to deploy, easier to use and easier to maintain software applications in this space. And those are all benefits delivered by the cloud.”

Sterling (STER) earnings call on the company and its opportunity… “Sterling is a world-class global provider of technology-enabled background and identity verification services. We offer a comprehensive suite of tech-enabled services in the human capital management, or HCM, life cycle area. We participate in 4 critical areas of the HCM value chain: the pre hire identity verification, pre hire screening, onboarding and post hire monitoring areas. Our solutions also enhance clients’ organizational efficiency by substituting for their manual processes. This is essential in the current market where there is a war for talent and companies need to move with speed and reduce their time to hire. This has allowed us to serve a highly diversified blue-chip global client base.  Sterling operates in a highly attractive global market. The global background and identity verification industry is large and highly fragmented with a total addressable market of $16 billion as of 2020, and it is growing with the TAM expected to increase at a 12% CAGR to $29 billion by 2025. Importantly, the majority of this opportunity is outside of the U.S. where we have a leading position and are uniquely able to continue capturing that opportunity in the future. We believe that there are several secular demand drivers that are increasing the need for comprehensive screening and hiring solutions. The gig economy continues to grow quickly, enabling people to have more than one job at the same time, with each of those gig relationships involving a background check. Similarly, the use of contingent workforces and freelancers continues to increase, driving greater needs for background checks. The ongoing increase in employee churn is also an important driver of growth for us. We’ve all heard about the great resignation and prevalence of remote work and increased desire for flexibility. We believe this has led to a structural shift in the workforce, increasing voluntary employee turnover, particularly with millennials and Gen Z. Another key driver is the greater adoption of background screening outside the U.S. historically, international markets have been slower adopters of hiring technology compared to the U.S. many international markets are only just beginning to view employment background checks as critical components of their hiring functions, which presents tremendous upside for our business. The value placed on identity verification is another important secular trend we see increasing around the world. Given the rising risk of fraud and identity theft in an increasingly digital world, the market is ready and hungry for digital identity services as a critical step in the pre hire screening process. And finally, continuous post hire screening processes are increasing. As employers look to manage risk in the workplace, we are seeing an increased demand for continuous screening and monitoring. We see an opportunity to capitalize on this growing market and continue to enhance our post hire monitoring solutions, including screening for health care sanctions, medical licenses, motor vehicle registration monitoring and social media monitoring.”

Corning (GLW) at Baird industrial Conference on capital deployments across its industry… “Across our markets, we see this content strategy playing out. We’re becoming increasingly relevant to major long-term trends that we expect to continue fueling growth over the long term. In Optical Communications, the world is moving toward nearly infinite and ubiquitous bandwidth. And we remain the only large-scale end-to-end manufacturer of optical solutions. Today, our unquestioned technology and leadership and broad customer base position us to benefit from investments into fiber-to-the-home, rural broadband, 5G and cloud computing. We believe the industry is in early innings of major capital deployments across each of these areas. New applications are driving network demand to an all-time high. In response, network and data center operators are expanding network capacity, capability and access. Additionally, governments around the world are announcing and initiating plans to extend the reach of broadband as network is increasingly viewed as a basic human right. Long term, we believe this is just the start of a massive digital transformation that integrates technology and connectivity into virtually every aspect of human life. Corning is uniquely positioned to enable this transformation. We consistently create new products and extend our leadership by delivering solutions that help our customers realize their network visions faster, better and cheaper.”

Compass (COMP) earnings call discussing the state of the Housing Market… “Activity may have normalized some from the frenzy of the second quarter, but demand remains high. Inventory remains tight, and our revenue and transactions remain at near record levels. There is new demand coming from millennials entering the market and foreign buyers returning to the market as COVID-related travel restrictions ease. Americans continue to express an interest in moving homes as remote work creates new flexibility, and prospective buyers have record levels of home equity to fund new purchases. As we talked about last quarter, continued strong demand for homes simply cannot be met by the current low supply. As a result, we expect continued strength in the housing market and the remainder of ’21 and beyond. Now we’re watching interest rates, just like everybody else, but we’re much more focused on the controllable growth drivers of our business. We continue to successfully add agents to our platform and grow their transactions. We continue to expand to new markets, and we’re moving into new revenue streams adjacent to the core transaction. Despite our success to date, we have significant runway to grow.”

TaskUs (TASK) earnings call on one of its levers for growth, expanding service offerings… “Our content security team has responded to the rise of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, by rolling out a service focused on securing the marketplaces or games where these digital assets are bought and sold. This leverages our existing capabilities and brings an adjacent offering to the market. Additionally, we’ve begun building a platform to expand the reach of our AI operations work. We see the need for a system that can supplement the work we do for our large-scale AI operations engagements and deliver rapid results by leveraging a combination of TaskUs employees and globally distributed freelance experts. This approach has earned us the opportunity to support the fastest-growing companies in history well before anyone else.”

Affirm (AFRM) earnings call on Adaptive Checkout and the BNPL landscape… “Finally, Adaptive Checkout, the reinvention of our core business, is fully live in the market, has delivered an over 25% conversion lift and has already been adopted by 44% of eligible merchants. So I think, generally speaking, it’s a fairly varied landscape out there. So if you are a platform hosting numerous merchants or serving merchants as, for example, on the back end, whether it’s processing or other [indiscernible] merchant services, those are national points for direct integration for Affirm. And that’s — I think that’s something that you can expect to continue. Obviously, we pride ourselves on our engineering jobs. So when we come to these partnerships, we come in with a view to make it more efficient, make it faster, introduce new transactional semantics, which may be potential for consumers and merchants. And I think all of that is just something that we certainly intend to continue doing. In terms of Mastercard’s announcement really change our world at all. The ones sense that our network differentiation ability to see and benefit from the SKUs embedded in transactions, being able to utilize some end-to-end connectivity that we have being both user.  In — to map it to traditional networks, issue acquirer and then our group, we’re all 3 at all times, which allows us to build some pretty unique products and services. And so I think the Mastercard announcement and this one before that were all targeted at bringing along other credit issuers that may want to play in the BNPL space, which I think is good in general, moving away from revolving credit towards installments, close-ended loans is just healthier for the end consumer. So it’s positive for the industry, I’m glad that MasterCard is something out to support it. We’ll continue building our unique thing, and I’m glad to see the industry moving towards products that we pioneered.”

AppLovin (APP) earnings call on the scale benefits of the MoPub deal… “MoPub itself as a platform has been in the market for about a decade. They built out a lot of tools. They cater to a much broader set of demand. Tools that are successful tools for agencies and brands to bring demand into the mobile marketplace as well as a robust set of DSPs. Pretty much every DSP in mobile was working with their marketplace. When we launched MAX 3 years ago, we took a different approach and built a lightweight platform that was really automated and pure for the mobile game developer. And MAX, as we’ve noted, has grown immensely. It’s processing around $5 billion of advertising spend a year right now on the platform. What we didn’t do was layer on this incremental functionality that would bring even more demand into the ecosystem. By bringing MoPub supply in, we’ll expand the supply to get to a point of late next year what we think is a target of over $15 billion of ad spend, which makes it one of the largest platforms in the world. When you have a platform that big, it attracts demand. And we’ll be combining in the unified solution, the MoPub product set to go attract that demand over. And we think once that happens, the whole platform will accelerate in growth. MoPub works with both games and nongames. And a lot of these technologies and products that they’ve built for a broader set of demand appeal to nongaming just as much as gaming. So we’re going to go after the entire mobile app ecosystem with this integration and unified solution.”

ZipRecruiter (ZIP) earnings call on the Jobs Market… “As a result, employer demand for workers is immense. There are about 50% more job openings now than there were before the pandemic. However, millions of job seekers still have not come back to work. Further, we’ve seen record high numbers of workers who voluntarily quitting their jobs each month, finding new workers is critical for businesses to fill orders on time, expand production and grow. Businesses know that success depends on their ability to win the war for talent. ZipRecruiter is laser-focused on using smart software to help these employers of all sizes find great match candidates for their growing list of roles. We believe we are uniquely positioned for long-term success during these extraordinary times and beyond. Our technology has long been delivering curated jobs to job seekers. In Q3 of 2021, we enhanced the new experience, allowing job seekers to see why they’re receiving specific job recommendations. This additional context leads to an increase in job seeker engagement, which in turn delivers more data with which we can better train our matching algorithms.”

Duolingo (DUOL) earnings call on how it is driving increased user engagement… “Increasing social interactions on our app has also proven to be very effective in driving engagement. Today, roughly 40% of our daily active users are following at least 1 other user on Duolingo, and we’re working to drive this percentage higher. We have a feature, internally called Kudos, which allows users to congratulate their friends for certain achievements, including strict milestones, completing 10 lessons in a day and getting promoted to the next league in our leaderboards, just to name a few. This quarter, we saw a 160% increase in the number of Kudos sent by users, highlighting the growing popularity of this feature. Today, 8% of our DAUs are sending or receiving Kudos on a given day. We also launched the phone contact sync feature, which makes it easy for our learners to add new friends. Early results are very promising. In the first few days, we already have over 500,000 learners that have opted to sync their contacts with us. Even better. Many of them are following each other and congratulating each other’s learning progress through our Kudos feature. We’re excited to see our app become even more social in the coming months.”

Marqeta (MQ) earnings call on the explosive BNPL segment… “Buy now, pay later grew over 300% in Q3. We continue to see our customers, Klarna, Affirm, Sezzle, Zip, Afterpay, really focused on creating new payment types at the point of sale, whether that’s in person here in — where I live, close to Walnut Creek, we’re seeing lots of Klarna signs to pay in the offline world. The payment type is here to stay. So we’re really seeing just strong sustained growth in this area. We’ve also talked about, we’ve seen 71% of “buy now, pay later” user survey said they’re going to increase their usage from last year based on more we’ve seen in the market, 40% of consumers even tried buy now, pay later last year. So the “buy now, pay later” usage is definitely here to stay.”